Bidding process begins for Sagatoo Road rehab

LINCOLN TOWNSHIP — A two-phase, one-mile road rehabilitation project on Sagatoo Road funded by two-percent revenue sharing funds granted to Lincoln Township from the Saginaw-Chippewa Indian Tribe is officially available for contractors’ bids.

According to Lincoln Township Supervisor Dave Hertzberg, phase one of the project will rehabilitate the road for one mile west of US-23 and include new culverts, re-ditching, a 12 inch sand road base and six inches of new gravel.

He also says the road currently sits on a log road base, as when it was originally constructed.

“That’s how they used to build all the roads,” Hertzberg said. “That’s all got to be dug out of there.”

Funding for the first phase, which Hertzberg says will cost about $180,000-$200,000, depending on sealed bid amounts, is expected by the supervisor to exhaust all or most of the township’s remaining two-percent funds from 2008. He added some of those funds were already used to pay for engineering costs to the project’s engineers, Lapham Associates of West Branch, which did the engineering for the project last year.

“This is the first phase and it’ll take all of our money, depending on the bids,” Hertzberg said. “If it (selected bid) comes in a lot lower than we expect we’ll have some money left over for phase two.”

However, Hertzberg says he doesn’t anticipate phase one will be a long process, or even one that’ll close down the mile of road completely. During construction, which he says will begin in May and last about two months, he says the crew will probably have flagmen to direct traffic through the area rather than the road being completely closed, due to the number of homes in that stretch of road.

Phase one, according to Hertzberg, will instantly improve that stretch of road, which he says is often traveled by ambulances, semis and cement trucks.

“A lot of people use that road to bypass the city of Standish in case of emergencies,” he said, adding the logs in the base, combined with the heavy traffic flow of large vehicles, are causing the road to soften. “It’ll be a premium gravel road. It’ll be good for this year.

“It will be a lot better.”

But some time next year Hertzberg says the premium gravel road won’t be gravel any longer.

Phase two, which is scheduled for 2010, will consist of blacktopping the same stretch of road, further improving the route for vehicles using Sagatoo Road as a means to bypass the City of Standish, Hertzberg said.

Two-percent funding from the Tribe will also cover phase two, he added.

“We’re going to do a continuation on the two-percent (this year),” he said, adding that both two-percent sharing requests made by Lincoln Township in 2008 were for Sagatoo Road rehabilitation and that the upcoming request, due March 31, will be for the same. “They (Saginaw-Chippewa Indian Tribe) know it too.”

Hertzberg said he expects the blacktop, phase two, to cost around the same as phase one. The bids for the first phase will be opened at the Arenac County Road Commission in Omer on April 23 at 10 a.m.

Two-percent funds are part of a revenue sharing promise between the state of Michigan and the Saginaw-Chippewa Indian Tribe that calls for the Tribe to reinvest two-percent of its class three gaming revenue with the local community it has a gambling facility in. Since the opening of the Saganing Eagle’s Landing Casino in Standish Township, the Tribe has distributed approximately $1.1 million to the area.

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